SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – Phobic Studios, the developers behind hit iOS game, Dragonvale, showed off their latest creation, Glare, at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend in Seattle.

The game is made in Unity, which will let the studio release on Mac, PC, and Linux at first, with some vague plans for mobile spin off titles in the future. It’s looking pretty delightful, with gorgeously rendered, faux-2D backgrounds and plenty of lighting and particle effects. That sounds pretty dry on paper, but it produces a lovely effect while playing. Here’s a quick video of the gameplay we saw in the closed-door meeting.

The success of the LifeProof cases are really nothing short of a marketing phenomenon — one that’s predictably spawned a parade of imitators. This isn’t a bad thing though, as most of the newcomers are priced more competitively than the $80 and $90 LifeProof pair.

But the latest challenger — Outdoor Tech’s rubberized Safe5 — is just $50, miles below pretty much anyone else.

Plants vs Zombies 2: It’s About Time has only been out a couple of weeks, but it’s quickly climbed up the App Store charts and shattered records. EA announced this afternoon that PvZ2 has been downloaded nearly 25 million times, smashing the total lifetime downloads number set by the original Plants vs Zombies game.

Over 10 million plants have been planted during the 81 thousand players have logged in the first week. EA announced last week that a “Far Future” expansion for the game soon will be released soon, but in the meantime, they’ve shared the following infographic to celebrate the 25 million download milestone:

ICU has shared a new video that goes hands-on with the rumored graphite iPhone 5S and second-gen iPad mini rear shell. We first saw part leaks for a graphite-colored 5S earlier this week, and the backing shown in this new video comes by means of the same source, Sonny Dickson.

The graphite iPhone 5S is a relatively new development in the rumor mill, and it suggests that Apple will offer a fourth color for the device beyond white, black, and champagne gold.

While Apple decided to hold out for a court battle — that it eventually lost — five of the publishers involved in the iBookStore price fixing antitrust case have already reached settlements with the DOJ. Two of those publishers, Penguin and Macmillan, are already sending out emails to customers to notify them that they’re eligible to receive iTunes credit, or a check for the settlement.

The best, obvious financial solution is one that automatically performs accounting tasks as funds are spent without the need for human input. But until such a system exists that actually works, we’re stuck with having to record our spending habits manually.

Still, it could be worse; at least there are solutions out there like the iOS and Mac MoneyWiz app pair to make the task somewhat less odious. Heck, sometimes it almost feels like fun.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – We dropped by the 2K booth today to chat with Jessica, one of the 2K reps in attendance at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) this year in Seattle. She showed off 2K Drive, an upcoming free-to-play racing game very much in the vein of EA’s Real Racing 3, with hyper-realistic, licensed car racing. Here’s a little Vine video of our hands-on time with the game.

SEATTLE, PAX 2013 – We got to spend some time with Ben, one of the lead designers on the free-to-play multiplayer battle arena (MOBA) game, Smashmuck Champions, currently display here in Seattle at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) 2013. Ben showed us how quickly a match can start and conclude, a far cry from the more typical 30 minutes to an hour of a MOBA like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients. The match Ben played in while he talked to us was all of ten minutes or so, full of frenetic battle action with fun characters, called champions, jumping around and duking it out across the battle arena.

Here’s the closed beta announcement trailer, though Ben let us know that there should be early access on Steam next week on September 6th. You can see plenty of gameplay in the video below.

The Smart Cargo is a portable cubbyhole designed to — literally — stick close to your iPad and keep all of your little widgets, gadgets, cables and trinkets safely together. When I first opened the package, sent by the maker and friend of Cult of Mac Dotan Saguy, I found it bulky and absurd. Then I used it, and I like it enough that I wish there was a version for the iPad mini.

SimCity’s launch on the PC earlier this year was nothing short of embarrassing for EA, with server problems making the title physically unplayable for those who purchased it. So you’d have thought that the gaming giant would have put extra effort into ensuring everything went smoothly when SimCity finally made its debut on the Mac this Thursday.

But it didn’t. It was another disaster. EA has now promised, however, that the installation problems have been solved.

AT&T has received a lot of gruff over the past few months from T-Mobile and its prepaid wireless service plans, so to strike back, AT&T is launching its Aio Wireless prepaid brand nationwide next month.

The new service offers AT&T customers the option to sign up for prepaid data plans starting as cheap as $40 a month for 250MB, to $70 a month for 7GB with a bunch of other options in between. After being tested in markets in Flordia, Texas, and Atlanta, Aio wireless will be available online to all U.S. customers starting mid-September.

During the history of my own website, I’ve gone through at least five full-fledged design changes. And I wouldn’t have been able to make those changes happen without the use of some great-looking templates.

Like many people, when I first started to blog I used the free themes that were readily available. But as the web became more populated, I decided to pony up some dough for themes that cost a little bit of cash. Then I paid even more for some robust ones. But if I’d had some of the templates found in The Premium Website Template Bundle I might not have had to do that.

Is your iPhone’s screen shamefully free of smudges? Do you want to test your memory, spatial awareness, and patience simultaneously? Do you love chalk?

If your answer to any of the previous questions was anything above “Yeah, I guess,” then you might want to check out publisher Chillingo’s puzzle offering, The Impossible Line. It’s out now, it works on your iPhone or iPad, and it does one thing really well: make you swear at a tiny triangle.

Apple has confirmed to CNBC that a new iPhone trade-in program will be available in Apple Stores across the United States today — less than two weeks before the Cupertino company is set to announce the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C.

Customers will be able to exchange their old Apple smartphone for a gift card, which can then be redeemed against a new device with a new two-year contract.

Can’t make it to this year’s iTunes Festival in London? Don’t worry — you’ll be able to enjoy the whole thing live from the comfort of your armchair. Apple has today updated its official iTunes Festival London app to add video streaming for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

If you like dystopian science fiction novels, Blackbar is for you. If you like innovative gaming experiences with solid fiction writing and a simple yet engaging mechanic, Blackbar is also for you.

If, however, you prefer your gaming to have lots of explosions and tons of hoorah military sentiment, Blackbar might not be for you. But you should try it anyway.

With the forthcoming iPhone 5C, Apple is finally embracing color in the iPhone line-up. What better time for Mophie, battery pack makers extraordinaire, to introduce an entire rainbow of colors to their low-end Helium model of juice pack.

When SimCity launched for the PC earlier this year, it was a total debacle. Huge swathes of players could not actually play the game they’d purchased at launch, because SimCity perversely required a persistent Internet connection to play. The result was that players experienced long loading times, constant disconnections, crashing and the loss of saved game data. It was such a bad launch that Amazon actually stopped selling SimCity temporarily in response to the criticisms.

Yesterday, SimCity for the Mac launched. And surprise, surprise! The Mac launch is turning out to be just as much of a disaster as the PC one!

It’s the day before Labor Day Weekend starts in the United States, and news is a little slow this morning. It appears to be slow for the Maryland Police, too. They are claiming that they “busted” two Maryland stores and recovered hundreds of “counterfeit” Apple produces that were being sold as the real thing.

That’s overstating things a tad.

Hey Strobists! Don’t you just hate the constant charging and swapping of batteries that your hobby/profession entails? What if I told you that you could ditch the AAs and instead use a li-ion battery pack that plugs straight into the external power-port of your flash, halves your recycle time and keeps going for way longer than your AAs?

You be interested, right? So what if I also told you that the graphics on the unit itself seem like they were ripped wholesale from the side of a 1980s arcade game cabinet, shrunk and stuck onto the Lumedyne X? Awesome, right? But there’s a problem.

We Apple users get teased for the lack of buttons on our devices. Jony Ive continues he and the late Steve’s joint crusade against the button. The thing is, it’s a crusade against the unnecessary button, which is why we’ll always have a home button on our iPhones, a kind of ejector seat for when things go wrong.

Android, on the other hand, has no such qualms about bad, user-unfriendly design. Which is why it has fallen to two Kickstarterers to go out and make a button for Android devices, which often lack physical switches of any kind [1].

Whitespace is an note-taking iPhone app that kind of combines Q Branch’s Vesper with a corkboard concept (only without the actual cork texture — this is the age of iOS 7 after all). It’s slick, it works with pictures, and it’s free (ish).

Hawaiian Airlines announced that due to unexpected turbulence in the quality of inflight entertainment options, it has jettisoned its inflight movie systems in favor of the sleeker, lighter, and infinitely more fun iPad mini. Jettly is the perfect source of answers for those of you with questions regarding the entertainment options on a jet, which could turn out to be the best pick for the reasonable price it charges for privacy.

Starting September 1st, 2013, all fourteen Boeing 767-300 aircraft in the Hawaiian Airlines fleet will be equipped with iPad minis to serve up entertainment to weary passengers on their way to paradise.

Pyle is definitely making some waves out in the waterproof-gadget space with their hydrophobic earphones and speakers.

We’re venturing out into deeper water with this next Pyle gadget, though, as it’s pretty unusual: The Surf Sound Talk is a waterproof Bluetooth hybrid handset-speakerphone capable of taking calls, if not actually underwater (due to the inability to conduct a conversation with one’s mouth full of water) then at least while splashing around a pool, in the drink or under a shower.

Following the release of Parallels Access on the iPad, the ninth version of Parallels for Mac has been announced. The popular Windows virtualization software has been updated with full support for OS X Mavericks and Windows Blue 8.1.

Besides performance upgrades, Parallels 9 features several new features, like integration with Power Nap in OS X. Windows users will rejoice that Parallels has brought back the old Start menu to Windows 8 as well.